The latest Android OS usage figures for early February from the Android Developers Dashboards show Android’s more advanced OS versions – Jelly Bean and KitKat – gaining share only very incrementally. KitKat, at 1.4 percent of all Android users in early January, is now up at 1.8 percent, while Jelly Bean has gone up from 59.1 percent to to 60.9 per cent over the same period.

Source: Android Developers Dashboards

This might reasonably cause Google a little concern, because the more advanced models of phone and device are clearly only gradually penetrating the market. What’s more, Android’s third party users and device manufacturers are obviously in no hurry to upgrade their customer bases to either KitKat, or Jelly Bean, from Ice Cream Sandwich, which remains at around 16.1 percent of the installed user base as of early February.

Gingerbread, the most common outdated “legacy” 2.x version of Android, has at least fallen from 21.2 percent to 20 percent. But the pace of change here is hardly breathtaking either. And once again, it looks as if Google’s device and partner diversity brings with it the penalty of slow and uneven upgrades. In fact, a 0.6 percent uptake per month for the latest cutting-edge version of the mobile phone industry’s most popular OS can hardly count as a systematic upgrade process at all.